A couple of weeks ago while I was walking around Ystad I came across this sign saying “The Distant Sound” project. Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? Here is what’s that all about:

I was wondering if there was some device needed to hear those tunes or was it just cutting through the air. I decided to go to the very end of the pier in the marina harbor in Ystad, one of nine places along the Scandinavian coast you can hear the project from, and check how it works.

I went there on Tuesday and missed it by four minutes! I didn’t have time to wait another hour so I had to come back some other day.

On Wednesday I got up early, for my standards, and got to the pier 20 minutes before noon, just to be sure I wouldn’t miss it again. I was a bit preoccupied the tune would not be audible because there was a beach volleyball tournament taking place on the beach next to the pier, with loud music and lots of people laughing and shouting. There was also a motorboat dragging a water skater behind, the boat had big speakers on the roof and was playing very loud music too, was it for the benefit of the skater? I don’t know. Despite of all that I still wanted to wait and hear the sound. I lied down on a bench at the end of the pier, I turned my face towards the sun and waited.

One minute to noon something strange happened. As if someone opened a corridor in the air filled with white noise… Made me think of “Contact”, the movie with Jodie Foster, in which she was listening to all those noises from deep space. That felt incredible! Everything else around seemed to cease to exist… the sun was still there, the warm breeze from the sea was there and there was I….sitting on the bench, listening to the white noise… At noon sharp the first distant sound came to my ears… a horn, then another one, and one more. A tune…, a melody… I would not call it anything like that, but it was played in a sequence and it was very different from what I had expected. And yet it was surprisingly nice and inspiring.

A minute passed and the distant sound along with the white noise was gone…

The experience itself is indescribable. I can’t call it beautiful. It might even be disappointing to some of you but either way I think it was worth listening to. And I encourage you to go to one of those nine places of the Distant Sound Project by Susan Philipsz and to hear it yourself. You have time until 21st of September 2014, every hour per one minute between 10am and 6pm.

The world has been always full of people who stood hard on the ground and those whose thoughts were far away from the reality. Some of them got to be famous: great businessmen, scientists, inventors, actors, magicians, singers, painters, architects. With great glory comes great money and even bigger responsibility for all the actions one takes, for all the words one pronounces . That conscientiousness changes one’s personality disassembling this beautiful, perfect world of dreams, ideals, moral values and innocence. The rules of our world are simple and strict: you have to survive at all price. You can’t be a dreamer any more, you have to become a harpy.

There are a few exceptions from this rule we can read about in papers, we can see in television or we know personally. But there is one the world will be missing the most, the greatest dreamer, huge idealist of an innocence of a child, whose life was so different from the lives we are used to see and experience that the world called him a freak and a pervert. He got slapped in the face every day but he never gave up on his dreams, he stood tall while everybody else preferred to change their believes than to go down with him. All that he ever needed was a little bit of understanding, a small piece of compassion and sympathy and it was all there, shouted and cried in his songs. You have to just listen carefully to those words:

“Have you seen my Childhood?
I’m searching for the world that I come from
‘Cause I’ve been looking around
In the lost and found of my heart…
No one understands me
They view it as a strange eccentricities…
‘Cause I keep kidding around
Like a child, but pardon me…

People say I’m not okay
‘Cause I love such elementary things…
It’s been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood
I’ve never known…„

A very few people had to work hard since they were 4 years old, even fewer got to be wealthy enough in their adult life to make all of the childhood dreams come true. Who could understand a man who didn’t have those little moments of fun and carelessness in his youth? Who can blame him for wanting to have a waterbaloon fight in his late thirties? Who could imagine building his own Neverland and becoming Peter Pan in real life? Nobody, because no adult would stick to his dreams having all that money, nobody would preffer the presence of children more than the company of other wealthy men, hance the lack of understanding for this kind of behaviour, and hence the gossips, accusations and finger pointing:

„Speculate to break the one you hate
Circulate the lie you confiscate
Assassinate and mutilate
(…)
It’s slander
You say it’s not a sword
But with your pen you torture men
You’d crucify the Lord
And you don’t have to read it

And you don’t have to eat it,
To buy it is to feed it
So why do we keep foolin’ ourselves

Just because you read it in a magazine
Or see it on the TV screen
Don’t make it factual
Though everybody wants to read all about it
(…)
It’s slander
With the words you use
You’re a parasite in black and white
Do anything for news
And you don’t go and buy it
And they won’t glorify it,
To read it sanctifies it,
Then why do we keep foolin’ ourselves
(..)
Just because you read it in a magazine
Or see it on the TV screen
Don’t make it factual
Just because you read it in a magazine
Or see it on the TV screen
Don’t make it factual
Just because you read it in a magazine
Or see it on the TV screen
Don’t make it factual, actual
You’re so damn disrespectable”

What would you say? What would you do if nobody listend to you, if everybody believed more in these offensive headlines in newspapers than in your words? Would it matter to anybody that you are just a human being like everybody else and not a mine of gold everybody wants to get to? In the end if you are no use to them, they will crush you, if they see they can’t get a penny more from you, they will dump you like a bag of garbage:

„(…)
All I wanna say is that
They don’t really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don’t really care about us

Can you imagine all this pressure on you? All those slanders thrown upon your name? People who live according to the rules we all know, can’t stand this kind of burden and sooner or later they break, they fall apart and they get depressed. But the dreamer keeps fighting for his ideals, he makes the use of all this to make himself stronger. He knows that eventually the world will remember him standing tall:

„He got kicked in the back
He says that he needed that
He got willed in the face
Keep daring to motivate
He says one day you will see
His place in world history
He dares to be recognized
The fires deep in his eyes
(…)
Every day create your history
Every path you take you’re leaving your legacy
Every soldier dies in his glory
Every legend tells of conquest and liberty

Don’t let no one get you down
Keep movin’ on higher ground
Keep flying until
You are the king of the hill
No force of nature can break
Your will to self motivate
She say this face that you see
Is destined for history”

HIStory of his life showed us that he never gave up on his faith in people. He trusted in the human race and every now and then he motivated all of us to follow what was not only his dream. He fought for liberty and tolerance, he wanted to make the world a different, better place for all nations. Taking small steps at the begining of his journey he made a lot of us belive that we can make it happen, we can make his dream happen. Starting with ourselves, grasping others’ hands and making them sing along and make the change, calling them our brothers and sisters:

„I’m gonna make a change for once in my life

It’s gonna feel real good, gonna make a difference

Gonna make it right(…)

I’m starting with the man in the mirror

I’m asking him to change his ways

And no message could have been any clearer

If you wanna make the world a better place

Take a look at yourself and make a change”

„We can’t go on pretending day by day

That someone, somewhere will soon make a change

We are all a part of God’s great big family

And the truth, you know,

Love is all we need

We are the world, we are the children

We are the ones who make a brighter day

So let’s start giving

There’s a choice we’re making

We’re saving our own lives

it’s true we’ll make a better day

Just you and me”

„Heal the world

make it a better place

for you and for me

and the entire human race

There are people dying

if you care enough

for the living

make a better place

for you and for me”

The power to make this great dream happen lies in all of us, not in individuals like him, but in whole nations. He did understand this but we never got to understand him. Even in his last days he had to face up to a lot of insults and speculations. But through all this time he kept his faith in people, and he kept dreaming like we all sometimes still do when we find a child hidden in ourselves…those moments are so precious, too precious to share them with anybody, it’s when we feel really free and careless and liberated. That how he must have felt all that time when we were misunderstanding his actions.

Now, after he’s gone, his dreams are going to make a diffrence for those who care. And there isn’t a person on this world who wouldn’t be influenced in any kind of way by his music, his dance or his life. Michael Jackson made a difference and that’s why he is going to live forever.